Vladimir Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls

If it weren’t for Lolita we might never have heard of Nabokov, which would be a huge loss. Success is so often a matter of scandal.

I like P.G. Wodehouse best; no one else gets us so high. But when I
descend into actual literature—an abrasive experience for my sensitive
soul, but one that has allowed me to fiddle away my time
unproductively—I cannot but acknowledge that the five great novels of
the twentieth century are Ulysses, A la recherche, Gatsby, Under the Volcano and Lolita.

Nabokov's
images fill me with awe; his phrases are tiny masterpieces; his
sentences, galleries with their own exquisite shapes. But even in his
most gorgeous stories he can be something of a stuffed shirt:

The snag with Vladimir Nabokov wasA dyspepsia almost as noisome as Waugh's.Life offered neitherA very long breatherFrom constant unbearable irks.Now I've wrung my enjoyment from both of these menI need not be exposed to them ever againBut I suffer the scourgeOf a lingering urgeTo pour Eno all over their works!What gives Lolita that extra thing is the confrontation between a cultured European and the
American vulgarity embodied by Lolita, with whom he is desperately in
love. Then too, one cannot but feel that it's a portrait of
Nabokov’s own passion. And passion delivers.

It’s shameless of
me to say this—I know nothing of this man’s inner life—but lust for
young girls does emerge elsewhere in his work, and in Lolita he contributed
the word “nymphet” to the English language. It's my intuition that his
stuffed-shirtism, so at home after all in the 1950s, is a firewall
against an unseemly urge. In one of his essays he opines that if the
criminal could only write about the crime he wouldn’t have to commit it.
Like Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll and J. D. Salinger, he converted the
obsession into literature. Balthus did it in
paint:

Nevertheless
I will dare to say that his orientation was not a whim. Many people,
for example, can be gay on a whim, myself included; but there are also people
who can’t imagine any other way of doing it. The conclusion forces
itself upon me that sexual preferences are hardwired. One might be
grateful if one’s wiring isn't too inconvenient, though there’s nothing
terribly convenient about heterosexuality; it can be as big a p. in the
a. as the other thing.

It’s OK to like little boys if you’re a
king, like Henry II or James I or William III (of William and Mary); or
if you’re an aristocrat, like the Earl of Rochester (the Johnny Depp film about him was dreary, so unlike the merry Earl) or Lord
Byron; or if you’re a famous novelist like Thomas Mann, or a celebrity
poet like W.H. Auden:

Said the Queen to the King, we do frown onYour choosing our page to go down onWhen you meet on the stairs—And it does give him airsIf you will do the job with your crown on!

But
if you’re an average Joe they’ll throw you in the can with gorillas who
are as repelled by the vice as church-goers, and will pick on you.

Ditto
for little girls: in the literary world you’re somewhat protected. When
he publishes his poems in a book Leonard Cohen can say, “The
fifteen-year-old girls I wanted when I was fifteen, I have them now. I
advise you all to become rich and famous.” But in the popular eye, like Polanski or Woody Allen, you have to watch it. Woody's mentor
in Love and Death tells him, “I have come to the conclusion that the best thing is blonde twelve-year-old girls. Two of them, whenever possible.”

Had Nabokov proceeded to his PhD,Would he have to shake his polymathic rattles at me?Had Woody Allen only finished his BA,Where'd his undergradjut exercises be today?

In Lolita
Humbert makes his own list: “Marriage and cohabitation before the age
of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces.
Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds.
After all, Dante fell madly in love with Beatrice when she was nine, a
sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson
frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the
merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his
Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve…”

He might have
mentioned Juliet, who was thirteen when she married Romeo, Edgar Poe,
who married his cousin when she was thirteen, and that other southerner
Jerry Lee Lewis, who married his cousin of thirteen—though Nabokov may not have been following Jerry Lee's career. (If a boy from Alabama marries a girl from Louisiana, are they still cousins?) PoeIs slow.The diction is inflatedAnd the angst is overrated.

Indeed,
one thinks of Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey, who tell us that there’s
nothing inherently wrong with sex with the young, that it’s the adult
hysteria that does the damage.

One thinks also of the pedophile priests in the Catholic Church—of the sheer number of them! Were Mead and Kinsey inspecting us as a tribe they might conclude that it was the norm.

It
is a convention in our time to go on TV and say you were abused as a
child. If you’re a politician in the Bible Belt, you oppose same-sex
marriage and you get caught using a male escort service, you go on TV
and say you were abused as a child. The etiology may be dubious, but it
works with the public.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I've just seen, the heroine was abused as a child, the victim was abused as a child, the villain was abused as a child—it explains everything!

As for my own case (I can hear you
asking), I’m a narcissist with a taste for older women. Now that I’ve
reached a certain age there are no older women, and the guy in the mirror isn’t looking that good. But one presses on.

Ours
is a period of neo-Victorianism. Freud, whatever his ultimate merits,
freed us, not only from nineteenth-century prudishness, but from the
Christian prohibition that dates from Saint Paul. Freud’s influence took
wide hold in the fifties and sixties, just as the birth-control pill
was freeing us from the anxiety of getting “caught,” as people used to
say, and penicillin was freeing us from the horrors of syphilis and
gonorrhea. Oh, we had much too good a time! Then herpes and AIDS, stark
parallels to the old scourges, pushed us back toward something more
sentimental.Lolita was written in the early
fifties, another dryness of atmosphere, and by his own account
Nabokov’s wife stopped him from burning the manuscript. Here is Humbert
hating himself even as he possesses his dream:

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her—after
fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred—I would
gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness
(her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court
through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave
gray eyes more vacant than ever—for all the world a little patient still
in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)—and the tenderness
would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone
light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress
her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human
agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her
naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust
would swell again—and "oh, no," Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven,
and the next moment the tenderness and the azure—all would be
shattered.

This, Nabokov insists, is not his remorse but Humbert's: "He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere."

Harold Bloom introduces his
study of Shakespeare, whom he regards as a god (and in his Gnostic
parlance he means it), by arguing that Shakespeare was anti-Semitic,
that we’ve been misreading The Merchant of Venice for four
hundred years. “There’s a price for loving Shakespeare,” he says. Arthur
Koestler once remarked that if he threw out his anti-Semitic books he’d
be deprived of half his library. It's rather sad. In Moby Dick
Ishmael, whose lover is a South-Sea islander, regards the whale's
whiteness as the same mark of superiority that gives "the white man ideal
mastership over every dusky tribe." What shall we do with these texts?

Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semitic child-rapist and a hypocrite, who lied even to himself. The only erotic moment in Crime and Punishment is when ten-year-old Polina, step-sister to the Hallmark-Card
heroine, comes down some stairs and kisses Raskalnikov. But any such
enjoyment is pinned on the child-raping villain of the piece, whom we are
encouraged to hate. Dostoyevsky himself was a loathsome man; one
wouldn’t have wanted to meet him. But he is the greatest novelist in
human memory, and there is no book as passionate, as thrilling or as
psychologically intimate as Crime and Punishment.

“The
great artists of the world are never Puritans,” said H.L. Mencken, “and
seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in
the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or
written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”

Martin Amis, a writer of astounding mediocrity,
is a better embodiment of our time. He is the son of Kingsley Amis,
whose first novel was a hit, after which he collapsed into a
lower-middle-class philistinism that dismayed his readers—but there he was, the author of Lucky Jim. And there was Martin—and he was a writer too!—sustaining his career on the same book.

Kingsley AmisIs justly famous,And his first book scored it!But it’s one thing to attract attention, and another to reward it.

When
Junior speaks of Nabokov he says, “you would need to venture to the
very fringes of literature—Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis
de Sade—to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we
rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable.”

16 comments:

I've always been disturbed by differentiating 'fiction' from 'literature.' You almost lost me when you imply in your first paragraph that P.G. Wodehouse is not "actually" literature ... but I persevered. Then you describe Martin Amis as astoundingly mediocre (I agree) but by including him in your rant you're implying that he does write 'literature.' As in Hollywood, an industry that rarely hands out Oscars to some fine comedies, and instead opting for violence, brutality, and angst, you're implying that literature has to be angst-ridden. I think it's time to look at that message and change it. Just because something brings you pleasure doesn't mean it's not good for you. Argh. And, just so I don't sound too cross, I'd add that your comic novels are both literature AND pleasurable.

You’re so right, Winslow, it’s a manipulative piece. By drawing horizontal lines with PGW on top, “literature” in the middle and Amis on the bottom, I’m distorting the picture. But that’s entertainment—and not hard to see through. I adore Nabokov, and Shakespeare, though they do have lots of angst. I guess I regard PGW and Winslow Eliot as guilty pleasures. Thank you for the compliment on my own work.

I hope you gather all of these Essays together in the future for another book/eBook. I loved every thought, even the scandalous ones here. I have a lot of reading to catch up on and I'm happy you listed your top five works. I'm partial to Magic Mountain, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, but had to slog my way through Ulysses and Moby-Dick for a Literature course. I also enjoyed Winslow's comment above. I hope to read more of your work. Best, always.

Funny I'm a 42 yr old woman. When i was a young girl entering puberty I fell in love with Humbert....Lolita remained one of my favorite books...until I became a bit older. I love reading your work. Each of my beloved novels, reaches into the depths of our soul, touches a part of our humanity what ever that may be sexuality etc. Shakespeare. Goethe, Chekov, Dostoevsky, James Joyce...I can go on and on...nothing is new under the sun....it is all the sum of the human condition....the beauty is in our interpretation and creativity..

Robert I ask why anyone could possibly not, be interested in the book "Lolita " I found the book fascinating many years ago, and later the film with Jeremy Irons , so very close to the written word daring and brave ,a pathos the sadness that is the love the passion or the lust ? I question the word lust . I found that I always am on the side of Humbert and the error of his seeking love ..

After reading this I feel inadequate in my ability to express how this affected me. I started it with the opinion that blogs are blah; I finished it thinking, man, they can be art, an embodiment of a kick-ass intellect, and as stimulating as anything in any other literary form. I have come away impressed to no end with your outragiously entertaining way with words. Count me as a fan.

Your mention of Dante falling in love with Beatrice "when she was nine" is apt, though it might be pointed out that there was in fact a legal age of "consent" for sex in the past (in most of Europe before the 19th century): generally it was 7. So 9 isn't such a stretch for Dante!

And yet, nothing on Nabokov's wondrous narrative stratagems? This piece left me wanting, for if Nabokov's power is to be found anywhere, it is not in the sex, but the capricious digress around you wanting to get on with it.